RSS Exploding Popularity

By now most of us should know RSS is a breakout technology for webmasters and internet marketers. If you still do not know what is RSS, check out here.

More and more people are using it to distribute content and to drive traffic to their sites. Readers have the convenience of reading the latest content aggregated in their rss reader without having to visit multiple sites daily. One of the major benefits of subscribing to your favourite news via rss is ….. you will not be having spam mail compare to subscribing to email newsletter. And of cause ….. if you still remember, readers subscribing to rss feed might just unknowingly get rewarded (Hidden RSS Reward).

With the exploding rss concept spreading, every big and small websites trying to include rss for their sites for any crazy purpose. Some have it just for the sake of joining in this rss crazed.

My ex-colleague who is working on one of the small local govt website. Her recent new site requirement, requested by end-user in-charge of that site, is to add in rss feed. She told me that the user in-charge dont even know what is rss and dont know what it does, but just want to have this functionality because every other site has it! I find it hilarious that some people just jump into a ship without knowing where it goes. As long as that ship is going to somewhere seems good 😀

RSS Submission

I have been running a RSS Directory for over a year and consistently review and approve rss feed submissions to the directory. The purpose of my rss directory is to index useful news and content feed so that other less savy webmasters are able to choose these useful rss content from the submitted feeds and embed easily onto their own website.

I have seen many kinds of feed submissions. News feed, blog rss feed, e-commerce item feed, article feed, video feed, etc. Because rss feed is so popular and effective now, everyone is trying to use it for site indexing purpose. RSS submission spam for my directory are growing over the past few months. Besides rejecting those adult, gambling types of rss feed, I also usually reject those feeds which use it as a sitemap, listing just all the pages in their site, reject those feeds from e-commerce affiliate sites having rss feed item all containing their affiliate links. And i hate those sites with dynamic rss feed. The webmaster will try to spam submit all kinds of keywords for their dynamic feed. Eg. rss-feed.php?keyword=seo, rss-feed.php?keyword=business, rss-feed.php?keyword=home-business, rss-feed.php?keyword=whatever-business, rss-feed.php?keyword=make-money, rss-feed.php?keyword=how-to-make-more-money …

One other thing that i’ve realized. There are many webmasters quickly create some blogs with a few posts at blogspot.com / blogger.com related to their niche and then spam submit rss of those blogs. Usually those posts contain tons of links to their own sites. I’ve also receive rss submission spam from pages quickly created at squidoo.com

Do they really think i am going to approve and index their thousands of spamming submissions? How are these going to be useful for readers? The wonderful value of rss and its main purpose is to distribute latest content or news feed, NOT abusing it to use it as an indexing tool!

Feel free to submit your rss to my PR 5 RSS Directory. However, as i’ve mention above, please do not spam submit if your rss feed has no readership value.

Over the past month or so, I’ve been comparing Statcounter with Google Analytics to see which one seems more accurate and which one offers the most features.

One report that I always enjoy viewing is my visitor map. This feature is available with both services. It will show you where your visitors IP addresses originate from on a global map. I’ve included an example from SiteFever below:

This first report is from Statcounter. Each mark on the map represents a popular location that my site visitors originate from. I like this report because it shows you an actual satellite image of the world.

This second report is Google’s version. The difference here is that with Google, the circle grows with more visits. For example, you can see larger circles over the eastern United States as well as the UK. These spots are more popular than Chile, where the circle appears much smaller.

Even though Google’s report seems to track more visitors, I was surprised at the similarity between the two. Seems like SiteFever.com is 88 countries strong and growing more by the day…

If you’re not already using one of these services to track your stats, I would strongly recommend giving one of them a try. With such detailed information that they both provide, you learn a lot about your visitors and your site, which will put you in a much better position to recognize any changes that may be beneficial for you to make.

This post is part 5 in a group writing project about driving traffic to your blog, organized by Steven Snell of VandelayDesign.com. Be sure to check out the first four parts:

Part 1: Driving Search Engine Traffic to a New Blog
Part 2: Be Selfish and Help Someone
Part 3: What’s Your Best Source of Web Traffic?
Part 4: Be Community Involved to Get More Traffic
Part 5: You’re looking at it!

Is it really true that you can drive decent traffic to your blog by being the first to comment on others? If so, how much traffic could you expect to receive? In this post, I analyze and share my personal statistics with you.

You may have heard that if you’re the first to comment on a blog’s post, you can expect to receive more clickthroughs to your site than if you commented somewhere down the line. I was not quite sure if this was true until I was given the perfect opportunity to test this hypothesis out.

On September 1st, John Chow posted his monthly income report. I knew that this would be a very popular post as it would be the first income report since he had started using his new theme. Guess who happened to be the first to comment on that post? None others than yours truly.

To date, there are 340 comments on that one post. It also currently appears in the first spot in the “Popular Articles” section of his blog. Did that one humble comment generate any traffic for me? See for yourself:

You’ll notice that Google Analytics showed no traffic at all the day the comment was made. This is because when I made that comment, I was in the middle of a theme redesign of my own and I had not installed the Analytics code, so it was not yet recording any of my traffic. I think we can safely assume that I received at least as many visitors on September 1st as I did the next day, which would bring the total number of unique visitors to my blog from clicking on my link from this comment to just under 200 in less than 2 weeks!

Another interesting statistic is the fact that over 76% of people who clicked through to my site were new visits. In other words, there’s a good chance they had never seen or heard of SiteFever.com before.

Oddly enough, this small comment drove three times as much traffic to my blog in one-third the time than a post John Chow made on August 25 where he specifically talked about SiteFever.com, quoted parts of a post I made and linked to my site twice. So far, that post has sent only 79 unique visitors over a three week period. (Not complaining)

I’m sold. I now know that commenting on other blogs- specifically being the first comment- will in fact drive traffic to your blog. I wonder who will be the first to comment on this post?

A few days ago, HMTKSteve brought to my attention that he believed there to be big differences in what AwStats and Google Analytics report when it comes to your website traffic. I decided to take him up on the offer of installing Google Analytics on SiteFever.com to see what it came up with. After 5 days, here are the results:

 

For August 25-29, Google Analytics reports 1,785 unique visitors to SiteFever.com while AwStats shows 2,244- a 25.7% difference.

As for the pageviews, HMTKSteve seems to be correct when he said that Google will give you a much more accurate pageview count because AwStats will count every PHP page requested as another view. For the five days I tracked, Google reports 6,343 total pageviews which comes out to an average of 3.55 pages per visit while AwStats shows 141,293 pages viewed which would average out to just under 63 pageviews per visitor.

I believe that you will find discrepencies with any traffic stats program, so maybe the real truth lies somewhere in between these numbers. After performing this comparision, I believe it would be a good idea for everyone to track their website from more than one source. If you’re interested in using Google Analytics on your website, you can find out more from http://google.com/analytics. I would love to hear your findings from using Google Analytics on your site, if you do so already.

Another statistic I wanted to share with everyone is how many people have downloaded my 22 page PDF Blog Traffic Made Easy. After being released for only ten days, over 600 people have downloaded the article! I wanted to take a second to thank some of the blogs that I noticed talking about it:

1. http://apatheticlemming.blogspot.com/2007/08/blog-traffic-made-easy.html
2. http://internetmarketingsucks.com/blog/2007/08/21/even-free-stuff-requires-a-sales-page-and-testimonials/
3. http://www.mikaelrieck.com/blogging/let-the-world-know-you-have-written-a-post/
4. http://rugjeff.com/552/building-a-powerful-blog-from-the-ground-up/
5. http://www.dailywebideas.com/free-resources-to-increase-traffic/
6. http://muiomuio.net/e-books-gratis/ (Portugeese)
7. http://bloggersjourney.com/blog-traffic-made-easy/
8. http://www.bluejar.com/blog-traffic-made-easy-by-sitefevercom/
9. http://www.antphilosophy.com/ebooks/faa-succes-med-din-wordpress-blog-fra-dag-1/ (Danish)
10. http://www.groundfloorseo.com/index.php/blog-traffic-made-easy/
11. http://www.intelliants.com/blog/articles/featured-how-to-build-traffic-to-your-blog-33.htm
12. http://www.selfemployedblog.com/blog-traffic-guide-worth-reading/

It’s the end of the month and you know what that means- stats time! 

If you read my PDF Blog Traffic Made Easy, you would already know that one of my short term goals for SiteFever is to encourage commenting. The first step I took in this endeavor is by removing the “nofollow” attribute from links within the comments. I noticed some surprising results. The chart below represents the daily number of comments on this blog. Check it out:

Take a wild guess as to what date I removed the nofollow attribute. It was on August 22. Within one week, the daily number of comments on SiteFever rose 716%!

You may be thinking that some sort of change in traffic caused this commenting explosion, but that doesn’t seem true. My daily unique visitors have been increasing by about the same amount the entire time.

Whether this change is a direct result of removing the nofollow attribute or not, we may never know, but the results do seem to point in that direction. In efforts to continue additional commenting, I will be implementing some additional features to this blog in the near future, so stay tuned!

Today, SiteFever.com has finally achieved 31,000 RSS subscribers:

Oh wait… that’s just Problogger.net’s stats linked to my feed. And here we find ourselves in the middle of another important lesson: Be honest.

For anyone willing to look for it, the truth is almost always easily obtained. At first glance, you can click on the Feedburner icon above and it takes you to my feed. WOW! Those stats must be real! But then you decide to right click on the icon to view its properties. Therein lies the truth.

With so many people lying about their sites- fake pagerank, fake Alexa stats, fake RSS subscribers- it’s important to remain honest with your visitors. I say this because just this morning I was browsing the net checking out some of my favorite blogs. That’s when I found a blog which I know for a fact had less than 50 subscribers last week now reporting that they had 3,000! They pulled the same little trick I just showed you.

Once your visitors see that you give a false impression about something, they will lose respect for you for a long time- or even forever. Also, don’t forget that bad news spreads quickly. Before you know it, you’ll have a reputation for being dishonest.

I won’t disclose the blog I busted this morning, but let’s just say I won’t be visiting that site anytime in the near future. I’ve lost respect for that blog and its author.

Even with all the millions of blogs out there, the blogosphere can be a very small world. In that world, you’re going to want to gain respect from people, and if you sell advertisements on your site you’ll be asking them for some money one day. When people see you fight your way to the top through hard work and honesty, you can be sure you’ll gain the respect of all who know of your blog. Start giving false impressions to your visitors and you’ll quickly lose them.

If you read my about me page, you would know that this blog got its start from my successful selling of many online advertising & marketing articles. Since this blog’s first post on July 6, I have not written any more PDF-style articles.

Well, you’re in for a treat. I have just completed my new article titled:

Blog Traffic Made Easy

A step-by-step guide teaching you how to consistently drive hundreds of daily targeted visitors to your blog- and not pay a penny for it!

This 22 page article is written in PDF format and is free to download and distribute.

CHECK IT OUT!

After reading, please post your comments on this thread and let the world know how you liked it!